By: Robn Ford Wallace

Staff Reporter

Zana Ennis is not one of those trusting land purchasers who believe that the earth was created by a benevolent, hygienic sort of deity who thoughtfully equipped each acre with sewage lines and a water main. Until recently, the canny 75-year-old, a former real estate broker, lived in a rural house by a river in Florida with a septic tank and a well that stopped working every time the electricity went out. 

“I could go in the river and try to take a bath, but there were alligators,” she said.

But accustomed as she is to the vagaries of rural life – wells, septic systems, man-eating reptiles – Ms. Ennis is still a little shocked at what happened at Sequatchie Pointe, where she and her husband, Howard, bought a lot in 2007, planning to build a retirement home. 

As the Sentinel detailed in a May article, construction ground to a standstill at Sequatchie Pointe, a J.J. Detweiler development atop Sand Mountain on both sides of the state line between Dade and Marion County, Tenn., amid a sea of troubles including a class-action lawsuit, a credit call-in by Detweiler’s chief lender and injunctions from environmental authorities. At the time of that article, lot buyers on the Georgia side of the development were unable to build on their properties due to lack of utilities, a moot point because no roads existed to access the lots anyway. 

Since then, things have gotten rather worse.

Ohio-based Detweiler declared bankruptcy last month for several of his entities including Sequatchie Mountain, the parent company of the development, making the prospect of roads, electricity and water lines there even dimmer. The Ennises’ lot now strikes them as worthless, but its tax valuation has gone up as a result of a reassessment by the county.

Along with other Georgia-side buyers, the Ennises joined the class-action lawsuit against Detweiler filed in January by Tennessee-side buyers, but in so doing they became liable for a share of legal costs, including fees for Ohio bankruptcy attorneys now that the developer has sought Chapter 11 protection,  an action that will probably further prolong the legal process. “At what point do I just throw up my arms and say okay, I’ve lost 20 grand?” she said.

That figure represents down payment and monthly installments made so far on the Ennises’ mortgage, she said.

But possibly the most irritating part of the Ennises’ problem is that, had they bought on the Tennessee side, a performance bond Marion County requires of developers would have protected their investment.  Dade has no such requirement. “I just thought everybody had rules and regulations, I guess,” said Ms. Ennis.  “I was kind of dumb there.”

In fact, rules and regulations for developers are thin on the ground this side of the border, says Ted Rumley, county executive and chairman of the Dade County Commission. “They have to make sure that it perks, you know, through the health department,” he said, referring to septic tank requirements. “But right now, there’s not anything else.”

Rumley said he is working with the county attorney on an ordinance requiring a performance bond similar to Marion’s, one that will pay for completing roads and utilities when the developer fails to deliver.   That  should be ready within a couple of weeks, but for people like the Ennises it’s a case of locking the stable door – the requirement cannot be imposed retroactively.

Across the state line, by contrast, the performance bond has been around for over 40 years, part of the subdivision regulations that Diana Chance of the Marion County Planning Office says grew out of Tennessee state law to protect the public. “It’s just crucial for the county,” she said.

Developers planning projects in Marion must either must purchase a bond for 150 percent of the expected price tag for planned infrastructure or provide a letter of credit for the same, a practice Ms. Chance prefers. “With letters of credit, when someone defaults, you just go to the bank and get the money,” she said.  

In Marion, she said, subdividing is defined as splitting an existing parcel of land into two or more tracts.  That means the subdivision rules may kick in even in the case of a parent giving Junior a piece of the family land to build on, an aspect of regulation that may put a few noses out of joint, but Ms. Chance says it’s worth it. Having the rules in place for a two-lot split means being able to enforce guidelines for a 50-lot development. Bottom line: “We want to make sure that everybody gets a buildable lot,” she said. 

And without such rules, she warned, that doesn’t always happen, as has been starkly demonstrated at Sequatchie Pointe. “I think the planning commission is one of the most important boards the county has,” she concluded.

But Dade’s Ted Rumley is not so sure. Ask him about planning requirements and most likely he’ll say, as he did last week, “I’m not for zoning at all.” 

And if the questioner is confused about how the conversation got from Point A to Point B, Rumley will explain that comprehensive planning is the first step down the slippery slope to zoning and land management. “And then you go from there to Phase 2, which is actually implementing rules and regulations on what people can and can’t do with their property,” he said.

But Diana Chance says there is no zoning in unincorporated Marion, where people feel precisely the same as Rumley about the Z word. “It will never happen in my lifetime here,” she said. 

But her office  has nothing to do with zoning, she says. “We’ve got subdivision regulations, they work, and everybody seems to be happy,” she said.              

Which may be an overstatement, but if Dade does sneak a peak westward to gauge the happiness quotient, it may well notice that Marion is applying its regulations not just to many of the same development issues as Dade must wrestle without the benefit of regulations, but with the identical developers. Not only is Marion currently suing Detweiler and Detweiler’s bonding company, it is also engaged in talks with the Southern Group, the Dobson family company now developing Johnson’s Crook in Rising Fawn.

Marion County Attorney Billy Gouger will not comment on the particulars of present negotiations with the Dobsons except that they involve the Cumberlands at Sewanee, a Southern group development on the plateau above South Pittsburg, Tenn. Marion brought a lawsuit against that development in 2004 for not adhering to its subdivision rules.

At issue in that action, which was settled in 2005, was what Josh Dobson in a Monday interview called a friendly difference of opinion over who was responsible for a road, the county or the developer. “I want to go on record saying it was a friendly disagreement, because these are people I go to church with and am friends with,” he said. “We’re not the bad guys.”

Dobson and his business partners – his father, Thomas, and brother-in-law, Travis Shields – live in Marion, where they have built several other developments.

“Finally, in the end, we just said okay, forget it, we’ll just pave it,” said Dobson Monday of the road in question.  “Now there’s no issues at all.”

Which may be an overstatement, too. As at Sequatchie Pointe – and as, at least as of the Sentinel’s last reporting, at Wild Moon, the Southern Group’s project in Rising Fawn formerly called the Preserve – construction seems to have halted at the Cumberlands. 

One caller who asked not to be named for this article told the Sentinel that only three houses had been built on the Cumberlands’ 6,000-plus acres; Diana Chance said that only four or five building permits had been issued; and Josh Dobson himself puts the number at just 15.

Dealing With Development: A Tale Of Two Counties

What’s the problem? Possibly one that has been discussed in connection with Wild Moon: water.

On its website, www.sreland.com, Southern Group advertises public water as an amenity offered by the Cumberlands, but everybody agrees it has none. “Oh, no, they don’t have water,” said Diana Chance.  “That particular development was approved with wells.”

A conversation last week about the Cumberlands with Donald Blancett, manager of the South Pittsburg Water Department, was eerily reminiscent of an earlier one with Doug Anderton, manager of the Dade Water Authority, about Wild Moon.

“We have no contract signed with the Cumberlands at Sewanee,” said Blancett, asked about the development’s prospects of getting public water. “We were in discussions with them at one time, and actually they paid for the engineering study to be done, but then all of a sudden we had the downtown in the economy and they went kind of silent.”

As with the higher elevations of Johnson’s Crook, providing public water to the Marion development would be an expensive undertaking given its lofty perch atop the Cumberland Plateau. Still, Blancett was dubious that a well could provide enough water up there. “It’s hit or miss with a well,” he said.  

Josh Dobson admits that the Southern Group originally planned to provide the first 1.1 mile of the Cumberlands with public water, and that that hasn’t happened; but he says it still may once larger water disputes are ironed out among the various municipalities, the Cumberlands and Thunder Ridge, a contiguous development his family built in conjunction with a partner who since bought them out. 

“Thunder Ridge and us are kind of waiting on the city of Monteagle to see what they do with the city of South Pittsburg, because if they end up getting water from the city of South Pittsburg, they’re going to put an 8-inch main right past, through the property or right down Highway 156,” he said.

In any case, he said, it’s unfair to compare Wild Moon with the Cumberlands, which was a tract the Dobsons bought cheap after it had been heavily logged. “It looked like a bomb had just been dropped,” he said. “Our vision was just to sell it.”

So the Cumberlands was sold in larger parcels, he said, some for as cheaply as $1,000 an acre.

The Marion County tax assessor’s office lists much higher figures – several sales in 2008 of $175,000 for lots of 5-8 acres, and the sole sale this year $115,404 for 6.6 acres.

What could account for buyers paying that kind of money for land even the developer describes as unbeautiful? “It’s mind-boggling to me, but a lot of these people have bought this property sight unseen,” said Diana Chance.

Similarly, the Sentinel’s inquiries into buyers at Wild Moon turned up colloquial accounts of out-of-towners who had bought lots as an investment without setting foot on Georgia soil.

Donald Blancett says he gets continuous phone calls from Cumberland buyers who say they were promised city water but never thought to check it in their contracts. He imagines that many made this mistake because they were from urban areas where a subdivision without city water was simply inconceivable.

And Florida’s Rita Kennedy said that’s what happened to her when she bought property at Wild Moon, planning to retire there with her five horses. She understood water to be included and never thought to check the fine print. 

She still hasn’t – a recent visit to her property convinced her to sell out regardless of the water issue.  “Our horses would think they had died and gone to hell,” she said.

Wild Moon has a beautiful barn, she said, but no pasturage around it, leaving horses stuck in their stalls.  “That is animal abuse,” she said.  “In fact, I don’t know what the laws are in Georgia, but when I talked to this development in North Carolina, they said they were required for every stall they added, they had to add a half acre of pasture.”

We’ll end there, the laws governing equine care being way outside the Sentinel’s scope. But Zana Ennis, the Sequatchie Pointe investor, says a few simple rules and regulations governing development should not be outside Dade County’s. 

“It’s not that difficult,” she said.  “I should just come up there and fix it, straighten everybody out.”